Anyone who knows me knows that I have a passion for board games. I also co-organized Games Day, an annual fun event held in La Pocatière. The next edition will take place on November 10th and 11th at the Bombardier Center in La Pocatière. This passion for board games led me to discover several very entertaining and educational science games. The games I present to you are divided into two main themes, namely programming and electricity/electronics.
In the first group we find Turing Tumble from the company Upper Story, available in French and for children aged eight and over. It is presented as a ballpoint pen computer. It is a game that consists of 60 increasingly demanding challenges in which you have to place different pieces on an almost vertically oriented board. Once we think the assembly is complete, we activate the machine and red and blue balls then fall across the board. We therefore hope that the given order of the balls is the desired one. Addicted to Techno has around twenty copies of the game available for loan to schools. The organization even took part in the French translation of the game!
Let’s stay on the programming topic: Potato Pirates (from seven years old) and Potato Pirates: Battleship (from ten years old) are only available in English. These are two card games in which you program your boats’ attacks to eliminate the pirate potatoes and your opponents’ boats. While playing, you can discover and put into practice various programming concepts such as functions, variables, loops, nested loops, conditional expressions and many others. Addicted to Techno offers a workshop based on this game for fifth and sixth grade classes.
On the subject of electricity and electronics, Elenco’s Snap Circuits sets for ages eight and up allow you to experiment with hundreds of different circuits. The parts are easy to assemble using snap fasteners. For example, it is possible to assemble an AM or FM radio or even a sound and light machine. The plans are in English, but the French translation is available on the Elenco website. Addicted to Techno also has approximately fifteen Snap Circuits 500 boxes available for loan to schools that request them.
Upper Story also recently offered a new game that lets you create mechanical circuits: Spintronics. The game is aimed at children aged eight and over and is available in French. It offers multiple challenges that allow you to explore electricity concepts by creating circuits made up of mechanical parts. We thus simulate switches, resistors, transistors, batteries, capacitors and others.
Gamble!
Special collaboration: Éric Dufresne